Had to replace my DVD drive after it 'died', and I've now got an Artec x16 speed (firmware vers 2.01). My previous drive was 'Region Free', but I do know that there is no firmware upgrade to make it 'Region Free' for this RPC-2 drive. This isn't a major problem for me, as virtually all of my DVD watching is done on my stand alone player.

However, I'm finding problems ripping from the new drive. I haven't yet set the drive to any region. I've got a couple of region 0 discs and they play and rip (in smart ripper) just fine-taking about 10-20 minutes to rip. However, I've tried to rip a region 1 disc and the progress is so slow-3 hours later, I was on 1% done! Stopped that, tried a region 2 disc-same problem.

Could this be down to the fact that I haven't set the drive to the region of the disc? If so, is there any way around it, or am I going to be buying a new drive cevery few weeks?

I'm running Xp Professional, 396mb ram Athlon 1000 processor, 100gb hard drive space (80gb free-partitioned)